Silo Season 3, Episode 9 Changed Everything We Knew About The Pact

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for "Silo" Season 3, Episode 9, "Farewell."

Well, that's one way to resolve most of the show's mysteries. So far, one of the biggest joys of watching Apple TV's excellent and underrated sci-fi show "Silo" was how it presented mysteries without getting too caught up in its own mystery box. The show does a great job of feeding enough hints or straight answers to the audience while also presenting a compelling character drama that becomes more engaging to watch than even the coolest mystery.

This is particularly true in Season 3, which has taken a page out of "Lost" and split its timeline in two, exploring the present day with the many problems of Silo 18 and also flashbacks showing how the silos were built and their true purpose. But as thrilling as getting these answers is, it's the story of Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) desperately trying to find out what happened to his sister Charlotte during a military operation that makes the flashbacks worth watching.

The flashback storyline reaches a climax in this week's episode. We get not only what appears to be the moment the world ended and the era of the silo started, but some huge reveals about why the silos suck. Particularly, Episode 9 changes everything we know about the fundamental set of rules that govern the silos, known as The Pact. Wwe knew The Pact is quite suspicious since it restricts technology and knowledge of the past, but so far that felt like some nefarious method of control. Now? The Pact takes on a much more real layer of terrifying and absurdity, because we learn it was actually written by AI.

In Episode 9, Daniel is told by Victor Crnkovich (Matt Craven) — the guy who created the memory-altering drug — that he didn't actually write The Pact. Instead, he had AI write the whole thing then did some editing with the help of Anna Thurman (Morven Christie), the congressional aide and daughter of Rosalind (Laura Innes), one of the figureheads of the silo project.

Sure, this line is mostly a humorous nod to one of the biggest concerns and threats of our time, and a cheeky joke to explain the more ridiculous elements of The Pact. But it is also more than that. It is a testament to the very deep flaws in the whole silo system. This is a huge project meant to safeguard humanity from world-ending catastrophes, created by a suspiciously well-meaning trillionaire. And yet, they left something as vital as the laws of the silo to AI? Is this why the construction of elevators or magnifiers is banned? Because the AI messed up somehow? What else did the AI suggest to try and keep humans docile and friendly for 500 years?

Season 3 of "Silo" has sneakily amped up the in-world criticisms and skepticism of The Pact from the start. Since Season 1, it's really only been chief deputy Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche) who truly treats The Pact as holy scripture. But this season we've seen parts of The Pact rewritten under the orders of Camille Sims (Alexandria Riley), the new Head of IT, despite The Pact being supposedly unbreakable and unquestionable rules. That we now know The Pact wasn't even an agreed upon contract written by the founders of the silo, but some dumb AI prompt makes all the suffering done on its behalf a mockery.

The idea of The Pact being written by AI is not the only big reveal we get in this week's episode of "Silo." There is also the fact that we got confirmation of why no one knows anything about the outside world. When Daniel runs into Victor at the site of the silos for their grand inauguration, Victor explains that he didn't expect to be very involved in the project as he is no engineer or architect. And yet, he realized there would be a great need to manage mass trauma when the silos finally opened. After all, the silos are meant to be an emergency shelter from a cataclysmic event that ends civilization as we know it, so that would involve thousands of really shocked people that would need help and council.

But we know Victor is no therapist. His biggest achievement is making people forget all their memories. Meaning this is confirmation that the Vitamin D+ drugs that threatened to erase the memories of everyone in Silo 17 really are derived from Victor's past treatments. He likely unleashed Vitamin D+ as soon as the silos launched, which makes their very nature even more horrifying.

That's because, as of the ending of Episode 9 featuring the nuclear explosion in Atlanta, we are left with two possibilities. One possibility is that everyone in every silo was exposed to the memory-erasing drug and forgot everything about the outside world and about history, and this is why the people of the silo have no knowledge of either of those. The other is that people did remember ... for a while. And in order to make sure they wouldn't remember the world before and get traumatized again, elements were added to The Pact that prohibited knowledge of history.